Frederick, Earl of Ickenham, remains young at heart. So it is for him the act of a moment to lean out of the Drones Club window with a catapult and ping the silk top hat off his grumpy in-law, the distinguished barrister Sir Raymond Bastable. Unfortunately things don't end there, and the sprightly earl soon finds that his action has inspired a scandalous bestseller and a film script. But this is as nothing compared with the entangled fates of the couples that surround him—and which only his fabled sweetness and light can unravel—in this first P.G. Wodehouse novel starring Pongo Twistleton's Uncle Fred. Best known as the creator of Jeeves (the impossibly wise, supremely well-mannered gentleman's gentleman) and Wooster (his unflaggingly affable but bumbling employer), Wodehouse invokes the very British spirit of a bygone era in gentle, hilarious satire that, as Evelyn Waugh puts it, "satisfies the most sophisticated taste and the simplest."